Trump isn't a temporary blip. Even if he lasts "only" four years in the White House, all those young Federal judges he appointed will have their jobs for life, and people like the thoroughly scary Stephen Miller aren't going away. He may well find lots of people ready to vote for him in any capacity, especially now that white supremacists and other haters have gotten a thumbs-up from those in power. In 2016 millions of Americans voted for a con man—a charletan. An ill-informed, ego-driven, perpetually lying, mentally unstable TV personality. The presidential mold has been broken, and I don't see a way to put it back together again.
I recently talked with a friend who said he has distanced himself from the news. He used to be a news hound, but now he steers clear of it because there's nothing he can do about it. Instead, he pays attention to his family, his work, and his community—things he can impact. I understand why he made this decision, and I'm well aware of the effect the current White House has had on my health. But I'm afraid that the action he has taken is likely what many in Germany must have done in the 1930s—before the sky fell.
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ReplyDeleteOf all the horrors that have come home to roost this year, the hardest for me is that I no longer trust Americans as a group at all. I grew up in a solidly blue collar home, and even as I was much more radical than my parents and their friends, I trusted that these people were decent, respected good sense, looked out for others less fortunate, and recognized a con man when they saw one. Now there is an epidemic of meanness, in morality and in mind, that has been fed by Trump. A swath of America is vicious now. Your last sentence...breaks my heart.
ReplyDeleteI wonder though: were people aware but unsupportive (or just unaware)? That's preferable to thinking there was informed support for what was going on in Germany, but it seems to me that there are many, many people who are aware of what's going on and continue to support Trump, Putin, Ergodan, that nutcase in Hungary... and I don't know how to fight against that kind of reality.
ReplyDeleteI have in-laws who live in the US and voted for Trump. I can't get my head around it. They're intelligent - reasonably - and nice people. I can't get my head around any of this. I feel the need to distract myself from the (US) news. But I can't. Because ... what you said.
ReplyDeleteI have a few friends (and relatives) who voted for Trump and still support him.They don't see what I see at all, probably because they get all their news from Fox and radio talkers like Rush Limbaugh.
ReplyDeleteI posted the following book quote on Facebook this week:
ReplyDelete“A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. ‘I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere,’ Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary—he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of WW1.
“Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of WWII. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.”
From The Death of Democracy, by Benjamin Carter Hett
(Benjamin Carter Hett is the author of Burning the Reichstag, Crossing Hitler, and Death in the Tiergarten. He is a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and holds a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and a law degree from the University of Toronto. Born in Rochester, New York, he grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, and now lives in New York City.)
I wish I knew what to do but all I can do is read the news and lose sleep, become anxious, become angry, get heartburn... I am afraid I am more like your friend who has distanced himself from the news.
ReplyDeleteEverything is broken. Every. Thing. But I believe it can all be fixed. At least I think I believe that.
ReplyDelete